The Home Front

People in story: Kathleen Hope
Location of story: Sheffield
Background to story: Civilian

This story was
submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk –
Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Kathleen Hope.

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I was ten years old when war broke out. I was living in a village in Derbyshire
at the time. On the Sunday morning, I returned from Sunday School to find my
mother in tears; she had just found out that war had been declared. We had
lived in the country for about six months when the evacuees (children) were
brought in. I remember standing at the gate shouting “Townies!” at them

We had to move back to Sheffield. My father went to work at TW Ward in The
Wicker. When the air raids started, we slept downstairs in siren suits so that
when the sirens went, we could get into the air raid shelters straight away.
Ours was an Anderson Shelter in the garden.

There were several air raids on the main blitz night; I remember it was very
cold and clear. I was in the shelter with some of my family where I spent the
night sitting on a shovel across a bucket; I could hear bombs and the sound of
glass breaking.

The bombers were following the railway line into the city centre and on to the
steelworks. My father had been to work so wasn’t with us at the time. He set
off to walk home from TW Ward through the city centre whilst the blitz was
going on. He was diving from one shelter to another. A policeman was killed
right beside my father.

When he eventually reached us, he came into the shelter but he was so dazed, he
looked at my brother and said, “Who is this young man?” He just did not know
him. Dad was a good provider. He arrived through the bombing with a chicken
under his arm. He brought lots of food, usually tins that he had salvaged from
burnt out warehouses. The labels on the tins were destroyed, so we didn’t know
what the contents of the tins were. They could have been anything from
pilchards to plums for all we knew.

The day after the blitz, I walked through Barber's Fields (now a housing
estate) to Abbey Lane school, only to find it closed. I was stopped from
walking back the same way as an unexploded land mine had been found there.

During the early part of the war, it was considered dangerous to have children
congregated together in schools, so we were split into small groups and taught
in private houses. This scheme was called ‘Home service’. When at school we had
regular air raid drills; we would file out to the shelters or under the benches
carrying our gas masks, which went everywhere with us.

During my years at Grammar School, for three years running, parties of us went
to Lincolnshire in September to pick potatoes. Agricultural labour was in very
short supply. The work was very hard and we slept in Nissen Huts and stables
for two weeks, but we were young, away from school and it was an adventure. I
received 27/6 (£1.37.5p) for my two weeks, my first earnings. Working in nearby
fields were Italian and German prisoners of war. Most of us had never seen a
foreigner before, let alone ‘the enemy’.

When I was about fourteen, I joined the girls’ Training Corps, the equivalent
of the boys’ Army Cadets. We drilled behind the City Hall on Sunday mornings
and learned map reading etc. I made myself a battledress top out of an old coat
of my sister’s and a navy skirt out of a pair of my father’s old trousers.
There were no spare clothing coupons to buy such things.